Data centers often comprise thousands of hosts that operate collectively to service requests from an even larger numbers of remote clients. The components of the data centers may generate an extensive volume of unstructured machine-generated data, such as activity logs, error logs, configuration files, network messages, database records, and the like. Unfortunately, the unstructured nature of the generated data makes it challenging to perform indexing and searching operations due to the difficulty of applying semantic meaning to unstructured data. The ever-increasing volume of machine-generated data may increase the burden on the components of the data centers, such as data collectors and indexers, which in turn may cause the data centers to become inefficient.